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BETH AMES SWARTZ

"My art practice is a devotional activity, an intuitive journey and  lifelong quest to transcend brokenness and create reconciliation,  transformation, and beauty. I focus on art’s potential for unifying  people, helping us recognize the commonality of human experience."


My series explore different systems of knowledge, both ones well known and some more esoteric, translating their philosophical concepts into aesthetic visual experiences. 


Uniting my art is its conceptual inspiration rather than a consistent visual style. I frequently include words and symbols from many philosophic and religious systems thereby facilitating communication with viewers on both conscious and unconscious levels.


Medium: Painting, Mixed Media

Style: Abstraction

Additional Bio and contact information

beth ames swartz

Primarily working in the idioms of abstraction and semi-abstraction, her paintings and mixed-media works are commonly informed by philosophical and spiritual concepts shared by people of different cultural worldviews, and often incorporate both symbols and words in the vocabulary of their visual language. 


Swartz grew up in Manhattan and by her mid-teens was studying at the New York Arts Students League; subsequently graduating from the High School of Music & Art, Cornell University (1957) and receiving a Masters of Arts degree from New York University (1959).


Swartz moved to Arizona in 1959. Initially, she felt out of place there, where desert rocks, prickly vegetation and open spaces contrasted with the lush greenery from the more familiar settings of her youth. By 1970, she viscerally bonded with the Western environment after rafting trips down the Colorado River.


Beginning in the late 1970’s, Swartz developed a process/ritual producing her “fire work”—art whose creative evolution benefited from the destructive forces of fire and purposeful mutilation that achieved aesthetic transformation. 


Swartz initially worked with fire in two major projects. Inquiry into Fire (1978-79) explored the use of fire as a painting medium; a sixty-piece show of this art was the initial exhibition at the Scottsdale Center for the Arts opening in 1978. Israel Revisited (1980-83) declared her feminism by honoring ten women whose contributions to Jewish history were underappreciated. Paintings were initiated with pilgrimage and performance at sacred sites in Israel; soil from the site was incorporated into the paintings.  Conceptually, the use of fire in creating these works also functioned as a cleansing and purifying element.


Healing, as well as pilgrimage and associated ritual, continued to be a  prominent theme in her art leading to her next major project, A Moving Point of Balance (1983-85). This endeavor offered visitors a contemplative and healing  environment informed by the Hindu chakra system and her own pilgrimages  to seven sacred sites in the Southwest and France.


She has continued to translate her research into various wisdom systems  and her own mystical experiences into aesthetic explorations. For  instance, Celestial Visitation (1987) channeled and depicted angelic entities that helped her mother embrace her death. Dreams for the Earth (1989) and A Story for the Eleventh Hour (1993) were visions for the healing of our planet. The Thirteenth Moon (2005) produced neo-expressionist, hallucinatory visual translations of  poetical thoughts from an Eighth Century Chinese “golden age” brought  about by cultural cross-pollination at a time of societal discord that  ultimately resulted in population declines of 68%.


With her most recent series, Broken World (2020), Swartz once again found solace by visualizing poetic words. A line from Hart Crane’s poem Broken Tower (“And so it was I entered the broken world to trace the visionary company of love”) reminds us that an isolating pandemic and political dysfunction may be healed through love. As the Broken World series evolves,  it continues her lifelong preoccupation with fire, but now as a visual apparition rather than as a painting technique.

Exhibits

Swartz enjoys recognition that includes over eighty one-person gallery  exhibitions, four traveling museum exhibitions originating at The Jewish  Museum, NY (1981-83); Nickle Arts Museum, Calgary (1985-91); a  retrospective beginning at Phoenix Art Museum (2002-03) and Arizona State University (2008-11). 


Three books, eight catalogs, reviews in ARTnews, Art in America, and Artforum plus many articles and videos document her accomplishments. 


PBS stations are airing (2017-24) a 29-minute documentary on her life and art titled Beth Ames Swartz/Reminders of Invisible Light (https://vimeo.com/  291409573). 


Swartz received the Arizona Governor’s Individual Artist award in 2001. 


Her art is in many public and museum collections including The Jewish Museum, The Smithsonian National Museum of American Art, and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Contact

BETH AMES SWARTZ

Email: info@bethamesswartz.com

Website: www.bethamesswartz.com

Instagram: @bethamesswartz

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